


Tomorrow

by Haberdasher



Category: The Beatles (Band), Yesterday (movie)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, References to the Beatles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 04:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19760347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: What happens after Jack Malik's last concert in the movie Yesterday, explored on a global scale.





	Tomorrow

There was a lot for the world to unpack after Jack Malik’s last concert as a musical superstar.

There was the love story, of course. The tabloids were all over the love story--how could they not be? Minor details like the main parties of said love story refusing to have any contact with the press, let alone being up for an interview about their love life, didn’t get in the way as much as one might assume. For weeks, cheap magazines and sketchy websites were filled with articles that combined surreptitiously-taken photographs with comments from those who knew Jack and/or Ellie in any capacity to paint a picture of what had lead up to Jack’s grand proclamation of love as his final concert ended, and to imagine what might be in store for them in the future.

There was the astonishing amount of music that Jack Malik released for free that night, albums upon albums of material given to the public free of charge. Music reviewers had a field day, analyzing his songs both individually and as an entire musical collection; bloggers wrote thinkpieces about the value of music in the modern day and how the occasional freebie might serve to stem the tide of Internet music piracy; a few bands followed Malik’s lead and released songs or even entire albums for free on the Internet, though none of them could match the sheer quantity of material Malik had given out all at once.

Then there was the lawsuit connected to said release of albums of material for free on the Internet. As it turns out, you can’t just hire a manager, have her get a small army of marketers to figure out how to best promote and release your two upcoming albums, and then throw all the songs that would have been on those two albums onto the Internet for free without consulting anyone else before doing so, unless you’re looking to get sued for breach of contract. The lawsuit’s initial filing, a few weeks after Malik’s final concert and release of materials, garnered a fair bit of public interest, and there was some spirited discussion regarding whether the lawsuit had any chance of succeeding, as well as whether legality and morality were at odds in this particularcase. The later developments in the lawsuit, on the other hand, didn’t catch the public’s attention in quite the same way.

As time went by and Malik still hid from the spotlight and refused to speak to the press, interest in his work and his story slowly faded away, until he was little more than an asterisk in the history books.

In fact, the most lasting part of Malik’s final concert turned out to be the bit that the vast majority of listeners had dismissed without much thought.

Malik’s claims that the songs he had introduced to the world weren’t originally his own were investigated, but most of the media was more focused on other aspects of Malik’s last performance, and initial investigations into the names Malik had given led to nothing but a series of dead ends.

Eventually, one intrepid reporter made the connection between a road trip Malik had made not long before his last concert and the seaside home of one John Lennon, one of the men Malik had named as the true creators of his songs, but interviewing Lennon didn’t give much insight into the meaning of Malik’s reference to him. Lennon had indeed met with Malik shortly before that concert, but Lennon hadn’t written any of Malik’s songs, though he had briefly dabbled in music in his youth, and he had no idea why the singer had sought him out in the first place, or why his name had been one of the four Malik had mentioned on-stage.

A few educated guesses were made by the press as to who the “Paul McCartney” and “George Harrison” Malik had referenced were, but the most likely possibilities seemed to have no greater connection to Malik and his music than Lennon had, and “Ringo Starr” remained a mystery entirely, as nobody by that name could be found. (Possibly it had been a stage name, but no record of its use in that capacity could be found, either.)

But while most of the world shrugged and moved on, a small minority found in Malik’s words confirmation that they weren’t delusional, and they weren’t alone, either.

Thousands of people, as it turned out, had memories of the Beatles existing, remembered the songs and the musicians Malik had mentioned; it was a small amount of people on a global scale, miniscule enough that only a handful could be found in any one geographical area, but the Internet has a way of connecting like-minded people despite geography, and it wasn’t long before forums dedicated to those who remembered the Beatles came about.

As those with memories conflicting with the world around them came together on these forums, a few details became clear:

One: everybody who remembered the Beatles remembered a number of other things that had ceased to exist in this new universe, and their memories of what had once been were identical (or almost identical; there were a few outliers, but it was hard to know if they were true deviations from the norm or just trolls messing with their data). A list of what no longer existed in this world was established, and as forum-goers went through their everyday lives and noticed more things amiss, that list grew slowly but surely as months went by.

Two: everybody who remembered the Beatles, who had this shared set of memories that deviated from that of all other people and from all physical evidence, had in some way been directly affected by the twelve-second worldwide blackout, which also appeared to be the point during which the universe had shifted in some way. It wasn’t long before a forum member learned that Jack Malik, the man who had mobilized the movement, had been involved in an accident during the blackout. Once that news spread, it became clear that the entire forum was filled with people who had undergone problems due to the blackout as well, whether they were simple accidents caused by lack of light like Malik’s or plane crashes due to even twelve seconds without electricity proving to be too long.

Three: while it was easy to characterize the difference in memories by what they remembered and others didn’t, there were also things that had changed rather than entirely disappeared, or things that the whole world seemed to know about except them. For instance, everybody who remembers the Beatles had no knowledge of the Greengills, who were, apparently, an American band that had initially seemed to be a one-hit wonder in the 50s with the saccharine hit “Love and More Than Love” before rising to fame once more in the 60s with a series of chart-toppers that were really just thinly-veiled political missives about pacifism and equality set to one catchy tune after another.

There was some difficulty found in naming this discrepancy in memories. The initial names used were the Beatles Effect or the Malik Effect, after the one who had brought the phenomenon to light, but as Malik’s fame faded away, those who shared his memories of the world before the blackout looked elsewhere. One name that grew in popularity as years went by was the Mandela Effect. See, in this world, Nelson Mandela had died in prison decades ago, but those affected by the Mandela Effect remembered it differently...


End file.
